


Cartoons and Compassion

by CaptainLordAuditor



Series: New Americana [3]
Category: Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Canon Era, Found Family, Gen, Jewish Character, Languages and Linguistics, Pre-Canon, i had to look at the russian alphabet for this and i hate it, jack is a big fat liar, jewish newsies, medda loves him anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 18:53:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14551170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLordAuditor/pseuds/CaptainLordAuditor
Summary: Medda didn’t usually think of herself as liking children, but Jack was growing on her.Written for Medda week 2018





	Cartoons and Compassion

**Author's Note:**

> "Jonathan" is an anglicization of "Yonaton", which is from the Hebrew.

When Medda opened the door to Mary holding a small white boy on her hip, she almost closed the door on her, but something made her pause.

The boy was sullen faced and tired looking, but still alert, staring at Medda suspiciously. They were obviously not related, but Mary’s nephew Benjamin clung to her skirts wearing a twin expression.

“You can’t keep him,” Medda told her.

“I know that,” Mary said. She came in and set the boy down at her dressing table. To Medda’s amazement, he didn’t touch anything, just watched them quietly. Benjamin climbed up beside him and blew a raspberry of boredom. “I - He’s a friend of my nephew’s. You remember a month ago, my brother died, in that _accident_?” she spit out the word bitterly; there was no way what had happened to Mary’s brother had been an accident, not when it happened a few weeks after he talked about going on strike. “One of the other fellows, Izrail, he was killed too. The man was the kindest heart I’ve ever met, but nobody cared about him any more than they cared about Elijah.”

“And you had to take his son in.”

“I had to get Benjamin!” It came out louder than Mary must’ve intended, and the boys looked up. She handed them a deck of cards before turning back to Medda, her voice lowered. “He was in one of those boys’ homes, and wouldn’t come with me unless I took his friend, too.”

Medda sighed and looked back at the boys. Might as well make the most of it. “Have you boys eaten?” They both shook their heads. Medda handed Benjamin a dime. “Go to Jacobi’s. Bring it back here to share.” Benjamin took the dime and nodded, hugging her before he went. Mary bit her lip but went to the closet to find her costume and start getting ready. “What’s your name, kid?” Medda asked.

“Francis Sullivan.” The words were slow and practiced. Still, the pronunciation was off, and there was just the barest pause before he answered.

Medda glanced at Mary, who was undoing her blouse. Mary shook her head very slightly. Medda didn’t really need the confirmation; she’d met Izrail a few times. Even if she hadn’t, she had trouble imagining a Russian Jew named Sullivan. She raised an eyebrow at the boy.

He looked down. “Yonaton,” he admitted. “But the others all calls me Jack.”  He spoke carefully, making sure his words were right. Izrail had barely spoken English; Medda wondered where Jack had learned this much.

“Alright, Jack,” Medda said, pointing at the box she had come in here for. “Can you take that out to the stage for me?”

Jack’s shoulders slumped. Medda could imagine his thoughts right now: _At the_ lodging house _we don’t have_ chores. But he nodded and picked it up. Medda turned to Mary.

“I know they can’t stay here,” Mary told her. “I know you’re just running the place and Mr. Miller’ll go spare if we let street kids live in here. But I couldn’t just _leave_ them. They need some place to stay out of trouble after selling the evening edition, at the least.”

“I was going to offer to let them stay until I lock up,” replied Medda.

Mary relaxed visibly. “Times like this I wish I had my own apartment instead of the boarding house.”

Medda nodded; she’d been thinking the same thing. The singles only boarding houses she and Mary lived in gave them both room and board, but would never allow the boys to stay with them. They’d come up with something. They could still look after the boys, even if the four of them weren’t living together.

 

* * *

 

It became routine. Most nights, after selling the evening papers, Benjamin and Jack went over to the theatre. One of the four would pay for dinner, usually Medda, since she had the highest pay. Medda didn’t usually think of herself as liking children, didn’t usually think about them at all, since they weren’t really an option, but Jack was growing on her.

He was quiet; everything he said was measured and careful and slow. Medda thought he’d talk more if he had more opportunities to get words in edgewise when he had to mentally translate everything.

A few weeks after he’d turned up, Medda went out and bought herself an English-Yiddish dictionary. She spent the next few days trying to make sense of the guttural language, completely different from her own. Medda had never learned a second language; she wished she’d started when she was younger, but it was too late for regrets. Just start to learn it now.

On Monday, she sat next to Jack and asked him about his day. He laughed at her, at the soft khets and vowels too far forward in her mouth. The boy bent over and the sound tumbled out until there were tears in his eyes.

Medda never learned how his day was, but she counted it as a victory. Five weeks after she’d met him, it was the first time she’d heard him laugh.

 

* * *

 

At some point Medda realised that Jack could read even less than Benjamin could. It made sense, when she thought about it -  Izrail had learned what he’d had of English through speaking and listening. She had no idea how literate he’d been in the language. If Jack could read well, it was probably in Russian or Yiddish. Didn’t Russian have letters that looked like English ones but made different sounds? How much of his accent would go away if he could read without mixing the sounds up? How much easier would it be for him to support himself?

That was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it? If Jack was going to make a living selling newspapers, he needed to know what it was he was selling. So Medda found a slate and chalk and sat down in her spare time to teach him.

It was harder than expected. Russian, it seemed, had thirty-seven letters. Their first lesson, Medda asked him to write the alphabet and he promptly wrote out the Russian one. She could see why - maybe half the letters he drew looked like ones used in English. When Medda drew out the English alphabet for him, Jack looked at the slate, then at her, and asked, “Where’s the talking dots?”

“The talking dots?”

“You know,” he said, “the bits under and on top of the letters that tells you how the letter’s talking. Like ah, ooh, oh, uh….”

“You mean vowels? They’re right there.” She tapped the letter _A_.

Jack looked confused. “Then you didn’t do it right! There’s gotta be more! Where’s the _rest_?”

Medda chuckled. “That’s all there is!”

Jack looked at her suspiciously, then angrily when she showed no sign of changing her mind, leaping up, his small hands turning into fists. “I hates English! Sometimes it’s like Russian and sometimes it’s different and sometimes it pretends to be Russian but ain’t and it’s nothing like Yiddish and it don’t make _sense_!”

He looked like he was about to cry out of frustration, so Medda put her hands gently on his shoulders and said, “I know it’s frustrating. But you gotta learn this. Besides - haven’t you ever pretended to be something you’re not?”

Jack thought about it. “Ta - _Dad_ always said I shouldn’t speak Yiddish around g - around Christians.”

“So the letters are like you,” she said. “When they’re around English letters they make different sounds.”

Jack looked at the slate again and nodded.

 

* * *

 

It soon became apparent that Jack, despite knowing he needed to learn to read, didn’t want to. Every night he would sit in Medda’s dressing room with his slate, bent over it. Afterwards he would proudly show off a drawing instead of his letters.

It was what she got for trusting a seven year old to study on his own, she supposed. She tried to scold him, she really did, but her heart swelled whenever she saw a child with so clear a passion as Jack had, especially a creative one.

Eventually, she broke and found him a notebook and some pencils, and told him that if he practiced writing he could draw as much as he wanted and she’d give him a nickel a week to spend. His eyes got big and round, and he nodded and promised emphatically.

She didn’t really expect him to do it, but within three weeks Jack was stumbling through sentences in English every night.

 

* * *

 

“You reads it tomorrow - you needs the practice more’n I do!”

“I’m _always_ reading it, Ben. I think I knows how to read English, it’s been five years.”

“You still gets the Hs and the Bs mixed up with the Russian ones.”

“How d’you know? I ain’t heard you read the headlines in three months!”

“Boys! I let you sit up there, you can keep your voices down!”

“Sorry, Miss Medda.”

 

* * *

 

Benjamin and Jack came in laughing, Benjamin blinking around at the world from behind a pair of spectacles. Mary was performing right then, so Medda was the one who grabbed their ears and dragged them into her dressing room to talk.

“Where did you get those?” She nodded at Benjamin’s spectacles. They were expensive; there was no way the boys could’ve afforded them without asking Medda for help, and neither one of them had.

“We bought them, honest and fair,” said Benjamin, twisting in her grip.

“He needed them,” protested Jack. “Medda, he had to put the papes right up against his nose to read-”

“How’d you buy them? With what money?” Medda let go of their ears.

“Dina gave it to us,” Benjamin told Medda, not looking her in the eye.

Dina was a troublemaker. Medda couldn’t really blame her, given the position she was in, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous for Jack and especially Benjamin to get caught up in it. “And where did Dina get the money?”

They had the decency to look ashamed. “She stole it,” admitted Jack.

“From Snyder,” added Benjamin.

Medda was almost ready to laugh. She hated Snyder as much as the boys did. He was the reason she hadn’t seen Jack for a month three years ago; she’d worried herself sick. Besides, Jack was right - Benjamin had needed the spectacles, and the only way to get them for him involved some kind of thievery.

She shook her head. She was coming late to this mothering business; she figured she had seven years to catch up on, since they’d come to her at that age. She couldn’t let them know she privately approved of this, so she gave them a lecture on the dangers of men of their backgrounds being caught with stolen money. Then she undermined it by hugging them both, since they only came by every week or so now.

 

* * *

 

“It’s really nice of you to do this, but I can’t pay you right now.”

Jack shrugged, mixing paint as he knelt down by the corner of the canvas. “Think of it as a thank you for all the times you let me hide out here from Spider.”

Medda shook her head, watching him. “You don’t have to thank me for that, Jack.”

“All the nickels you gave me when I was a kid, then.”

“Those nickels could hardly pay for the supplies you’re using on this!” Medda waved her hand over the backdrop in progress. “Besides, that money was payment for your work.”

“Work I was doing for me!” Jack tossed his brush into his pallette, setting it down as he turned to look at her. “A - a thanks for everything, Medda. For the, the nickels, and teaching me English, and taking me in. I don’t know how to pay you back for that.”

Medda hugged him so he wouldn’t have to see her face. “You don’t have to, sweetheart. I just did the job in front of me.”

Jack hugged her back. He was big enough now that he could wrap his arms all the way around her back and have them meet, and Medda liked feeling how much he’d grown in the past ten years. “I’m just doing the same thing, Medda.”

Medda pulled back and looked at him seriously. “Painting’s a skill you’ve learned, Jack Kelly, and painting for free isn’t saving lives. I’m gonna pay you when I can, because if you get in the habit of selling this skill for free you won’t ever get anywhere.”

Jack looked down and smiled. “Thanks, Medda. But just let this one be a gift. Next one, you pay me for.”

 

* * *

 

Jack sat backstage, chewing his lip and turning his cap over in his hands. Occasionally he’d wipe his eyes or make a motion to put his hat back on, then change his mind. Eventually, he said, “Pulitzer offered me a job.”

“I’d heard. You don’t want to take it?”

Jack shook his head, taking a deep and shaky breath. “It ain’t that. I just….”

Medda rubbed his shoulder. “I’m proud of you whatever you decide, kid. You did the right thing with the strike and I trust you to keep doing it.”

Jack swallowed. “Thanks. That means a lot, coming from you. It’s just - I don’t care that I’d be working for Pulitzer, not really. It ain’t that.”

“What’s bothering you, Jack?” She wrapped him in a one-armed hug.

He leaned into her. “If I’m gonna be a cartoonist, I gotta have a name. To put under the cartoons in the papes.”

Medda thought she understood. “You’re tired of being Kelly.”

“I’m tired of lying.” He sounded exhausted. “I’m tired of hiding, damn what Tateh said to me. But I don’t… I don’t remember my name. And I feel like maybe I’m a bad person, not remembering my own name.”

Izrail had had the most Jewish name Medda had ever heard, and she thought he’d be proud of his son for going back to it, but it was a shock to think the seven year old boy who’d told her his name was Francis Sullivan was the same one sitting next to her. “Cohen,” she whispered. “Your name was Yonaton Cohen.”

Jack paused, then replied, “God, that’s the most Jewish name I’ve ever heard.”

Medda laughed.

 

* * *

 

“Medda! Medda!” The hammering at her door was paired by an excited voice. Medda pulled herself out of bed, threw on a robe and went to see what Jack wanted.

He stood there with a paper clutched in his hands and a grin splitting his face in two, vibrating with excitement. “Look,” he said. He handed her the paper. It was the latest edition of _The New York World_. Jack must’ve just come from the printers to get it this time of day. “On the third page, Medda. I did it. I wanted you to be the first one to see.”

Despite the hour, all of Medda’s tiredness vanished. She opened it to the third page to see Jack’s drawing of McKinley and Aguinaldo next to an article about the war in the Philippines. She threw her arms around Jack, enveloping him in a tight embrace. “I’m so _proud.”_

Jack returned the hug and said, “Did you read it? Medda, did you really look at it? There’s something I want to show you on it. I should’ve asked first, but-” he pulled away and took the paper from her. “I wanted to do right by you. You’s the one that got me here.”

Medda looked where he was pointing and felt tears forming in her eyes. There, in the corner, was the cartoonist’s name: _J. C. Larkin._


End file.
